‘Occupation of Kokoda is expected by our troops 2nd November…The enemy is beaten. Give him no rest and we will annihilate him’
—General Vasey to Australian officers, 1 November 1942
Vasey had flown over the mountains in July, so he knew the scale of the place; now he confronted the Owen Stanleys on foot. At 47, he remained fit, but his knee grew ‘swollen with fluid’ as he climbed the slopes between Myola and Eora Creek. He ignored his medical officer’s concern until the pain grew intolerable—and each night, in sworn secrecy, Kingsley Norris re-dressed and bandaged the general’s swollen knee joint.
Vasey had a civilian’s eye for the beauty of the track: ‘In other conditions it would really be a beautiful walk—forest everywhere and lots of lovely streams, but at present they merely make mud.’1 He reached Alola—recaptured unopposed by the 16th Brigade—sweating and puffing, and vomited up his first cup of sweet, black tea.
At Alola he provocatively established his divisional HQ just forward of Eather’s, and noted with satisfaction that Eather then resited his brigade HQ up past his commander’s. ‘That’s the way to keep ‘em moving,’Vasey said, ‘…march divvy headquarters past the brigade and they’ll move on.’2 In such ways, Vasey kept up the relentless pressure on his officers: driving them forward, goading them on, so that a constant sense of the urgency of the advance rippled down the ranks, from the brigadiers to the battalion commanders to the company officers, to the platoon leaders, corporals and private soldiers.
With Kokoda half a day’s march away, Vasey cracked the whip. It was thought the Japanese might have abandoned the station too (indeed, a patrol led by Lieutenant Fred Winkle3 four days earlier had found the airfield deserted—though Allen had not been informed of this). Vasey was determined to recapture the vital airfield within days, and Eather’s 25th Brigade was given the honour of doing so. Meanwhile, Lloyd’s 16th Brigade, with Cullen’s battalion in the vanguard, pursued the enemy north-east, along the track toward the villages of Oivi and Gorari.
Horii had not lost hope. In late October he’d been told to expect an entire division of reinforcements4—some 20,000 troops—with which to strike back. The news was electrifying: ‘The desire to take Port Moresby blazed up and there were many shouts of joy and exultation,’ wrote one soldier.5
Their flames were swiftly doused: the order was countermanded on 2 November as the situation in Guadalcanal deteriorated. Most of the fresh division went to the Solomons; those who did attempt to land at Buna faced Allied air raids. The Shitai’s morale ‘dropped alarmingly’, noted one witness.
Of the original 6000-strong infantry of the South Seas Detachment, less than a thousand were fit enough to fight—though this is a relative term. Of his original 500-strong force, the commander of the Koiwai Battalion counted just sixteen fit soldiers—five of whom were engineers.6 The rest were dead, wounded, sick, starving, or had simply disappeared. Only 176 and 180 ‘effectives’ remained of the Kuwada and Horie battalions respectively, which had lost 568 and 617 men.7
Medical officer Hayashi Hiroyuki had charted the Japanese casualty rate in his diary since the retreat from Ioribaiwa:
24 Sept 42: The [Kokoda] Field Hosp will withdraw. At about 1200…the sick and wounded would start out.
29 Sept 42:…Our coy is to proceed to Eora and receive rations. And we are to assist the Engr Tai in taking patients to the field hosp between Giruwa and Kokoda.
8 Oct 42: Our casualties: Aug: 400 killed, 600 wounded; Sep: 200 killed.
11 Oct 42: Up to this date the number of sick and wounded exceeds 3000.8
On 1 November, in a jungle clearing at Ilimo, Horii addressed the survivors of the Nankai Shitai. Defiant to the last, he still believed in the possibility of a counteroffensive (and it seems he made this speech in the expectation of reinforcements):
Some time ago, the Shitai was ordered to cross the Stanley Range. With bravery and determination you men advanced as far as Iorabaiwa [sic] in the face of stubborn enemy resistance. We had Port Moresby under our mercy and created terror in the hearts of the enemy.
However, the general situation of the Army forced the Shitai into an unwilling withdrawal. For this reason the Stanley Shitai had to employ defensive tactics at Eora and The Gap…
…we will withdraw to the Kumusi River area, where problems of supply are comparatively easy, and prepare for a future offensive.
To repeat, our withdrawal will not be the result of the superiority of the enemy. It was aimed to recover the health and strength of the troops. To compare this with defeat shows a gross misunderstanding.
Exert yourselves towards making a healthy recuperation…prepare for brave and active counter-attacks. To build up our morale and inflexible fighting spirit is the most important thing at present.
It is believed that the enemy, as is characteristic of him, will take this advantage of making further persistent attacks on our front lines. They may also penetrate our flanks and rear. If such an occasion arises, the Shitai will make determined counter-attacks and destroy the enemy.
For the sake of honour, all units, regardless of whether they are combatants, non-combatants or Army employees, are expected to recover their fighting strength spiritually as well as physically, thereby demonstrating the strength of the high-spirited, brilliant Shitai.9
His last remark meant, in effect, that the Shitai’s medics, transport troops, carriers and HQ staff were to join the infantry as combat troops. None would be spared a role in Horii’s lonely Götterdämmerung; the doomed fragment of the Imperial Army would, literally, go down fighting.
Unknown to Horii, the Australians had successfully intercepted Japanese army signals, and knew his approximate strength and the position of some of his reinforcements.
Blamey passed this news to MacArthur on 30 October: ‘On 28 Oct…Sigs 1 Aust Corps intercepted for the first time the full text of a number of Jap messages…in the KOKODA area…’ It established that three battalions were ‘still forward of KOKODA or in that area’. Blamey added that a ‘relieving unit’, sent to join the Shitai, was sighted moving up the track between Wairopi and Kokoda.10
Horii’s relieving units were, in fact, fairly substantial reinforcements. They were fresh troops brought up from the beachhead or shipped in from Rabaul, to arrest the retreat and shore up the Gona–Buna littoral. The merged force withdrew to the elevated land on the Kumusi flood plain near the villages of Oivi and Gorari. It astonished the Australian tacticians that Horii chose to make his last act of resistance on the western side of the Kumusi—with his back to the river.
This intelligence was a great encouragement to Vasey, as was the confirmation that the Japanese had abandoned Kokoda. On 1 November, Vasey issued his first ‘Order of the Day’ to unit commanders: ‘Occupation of Kokoda is expected by our troops 2nd November. Congratulations to you and the fine troops under your command for the rapid advance you have made under shocking conditions…The enemy is beaten. Give him no rest and we will annihilate him. It is only a matter of a day or two. Tighten your belts and push on.’11 On the 3rd he ordered Lloyd’s brigade to move towards Oivi in full strength.
At dawn on 1 November a little patrol led by Lieutenant Albert Black12 crept into Kokoda unopposed. The Japanese had abandoned the village two days before. The Australian troops jubilantly followed Black’s men and on the 4th spread out over the plateau without a single shot being fired.
Three months after the Imperial Army had driven out the 39th Battalion, the Australians reclaimed the airstrip. Vasey magnanimously acknowledged the victory as Allen’s—notwithstanding gushing congratulations personally from Blamey, who felt the recapture of Kokoda a tacit vindication of Allen’s dismissal.*
That afternoon Vasey raised the Australian flag on the site of the old Kokoda administration building, and held a ceremony of remembrance for those who had died in the mountain campaign. The much-diminished 25th Brigade paraded at the tip of the plateau, where crumbling walls and bomb craters marked the site of the old station buildings.
Bert Kienzle, master of the carrier lines, had fulfilled his promise to the mountain tribes that he would return in time for Christmas. They emerged from the hills and plantations to see his promise honoured, welcoming him ‘like a long lost son’, wrote Raymond Paull.13
The local people were ‘bedecked with flowers and shrubs, and all smiles,’ Kienzle observed, and happy to be back in Kokoda even as they picked over the obliterated remains. ‘They knew they had done well.’
They were put immediately to work, but did not begrudge Kienzle’s determination to protect the station. The most urgent task was the restoration of the airfield: ‘All available carriers which I could muster were put on during the afternoon weeding the landing ground which was overgrown. The Japs had not used it.’
Kienzle looked in on his plantation at Yodda on the 5th: two farm buildings were burnt down, his own house riddled with machine-gun and mortar fire, and all his possessions removed and destroyed. ‘The rubber trees were still standing, a few mutilated…’14
Vernon, sick with jungle fever, came down the track through the rubber trees where three months ago he’d waited in the mist for the last man to leave Kokoda. On the way he passed a dump of Japanese kit. It was a souvenir hunter’s paradise. Amidst the wreckage he noticed ‘barrels of a fermented sauce, a first class preventative of BeriBeri…a delicacy which seems to follow the trail of the exiled Jap wherever he goes’.15
He salvaged a Japanese bicycle, with one pedal and no tyres, ‘hopped onto it and the boys shoved behind, highly excited…’ To whoops of joy from native boys Vernon weaved triumphantly into Kokoda.
He might have arrived on a donkey, such were the tears of happiness in the eyes of the fuzzy wuzzies to whose welfare he’d devoted his waking hours.
Vernon dumped the bike, reported to the ANGAU camp in the Yodda valley, sat back and contemplated the vast serenity around him: ‘I had at last got home.’16
There were more happy scenes that day. All available carriers assembled on the Kokoda plateau at 4.30 p.m. to receive the gratitude of the Australian nation. Five were awarded medals for outstanding service, and every carrier received an issue of knives and ramie (a popular native delicacy).
Vasey, with Kienzle interpreting, thanked the crowds of carriers and stretcher-bearers for their loyal service: ‘Without your help,’ Vasey said, ‘we would not have been able to cross the Owen Stanley Range.’17
The tribes responded appreciatively with loud drumming and a traditional chant, which resounded across the Mambare Valley. That night fires were lit and a hot meal with tea served to the troops.
Within two days the airstrip was cleared and refitted, and at precisely 9.45 a.m. on 4 November the first planes flew in a dazzling array of supplies. The bellies of ten Dakotas yielded American jeeps, ammunition, new weapons, cigarettes, bread and chocolate, fresh meat and vegetables, baked beans, tinned fruit, jam and butter.
The troops gobbled up these delicacies, but their stomachs, so used to army biscuits and bully beef, rejected them, and they lay ‘retching and heaving’ on the ground.18 Felt hats were issued, to replace their hot, tin helmets, and new uniforms, boots, socks and blankets were great restoratives.
Kokoda rapidly became a flourishing Allied air base—an indispensable depot in the coming thrust to the sea. The wounded, too, were greatly relieved—for the first time, they could be flown safely back to Port Moresby (though this didn’t help the 485 men then lying at Myola, back in the mountains).
The troops’ brains were fed as well as their bodies. The day after the capture of Kokoda, Blamey busied himself ordering books for the army’s field library. Major-General Victor Stantke, Adjutant-General, Victoria Barracks, Melbourne, obliged by sending up copies of the arresting title, Savages in Papua. The Australian Army Education Service thoughtfully added to their library Headhunters, by Ion Idriess; My South Sea Adventures, by J. McLaren; My Tropic Isle, by E.J. Badfield; and Roberts’ Short Stories of the South Seas.
Blamey backed a new troops’ magazine called Guinea Gold, for which he requested articles ‘dealing with such subjects as birds, butterflies, animals, plants…and insects pertaining to New Guinea’. These, he believed, would ‘stimulate a very active interest on the part of the men in their surroundings’.*
The Japanese sick and wounded bumped back towards the coast in the hope of evacuation. The fittest had fled the dreadful Kokoda field hospital, and only the bodies of the dead or dying remained under the palm-frond roof. Those unable to walk, or lacking the strength to commit suicide, had been shot in their stretchers.
When the walking Japanese wounded reached the beachhead they were directed to the ghastly Giruwa Line of Communication Hospital, east of Sanananda. In October this little cluster of huts and tents, set back from the beach, received 1160 new patients. On the last day of that month, Giruwa held a total of 1325 (215 wounded, 1110 sick), 225 of whom drifted in on 26 October. Of 637 patients who belonged to the Naval Pioneers, 520 had acute malaria. By mid-November the 500-bed hospital contained some 2000 patients, most of whom lay about on the jungle floor awaiting treatment.19 More plodded in every day; and the team of 57 doctors and medical orderlies were soon reduced to a state of utter helplessness.
First Lieutenant Okubo Fukunobo, a Japanese army medical officer at Giruwa, calculated on 31 October that he had only enough food to feed 380 patients for seventeen days. In sum, half a fixed ration for each patient for about a week: ‘the quality and quantity of food has gradually declined…patients cannot be expected to regain their vitality,’ Okubo grimly concluded.20
His medical fixtures were execrable. The tents were rotting, and ‘holes appear simply if you touch the material’. Patients were constantly drenched. The panniers were falling apart from corrosion; the leather straps on stretchers had lost their pliability. The metal parts had rusted and the bases deteriorated. The few surgical instruments were rusting and useless; there were scarcely any painkillers; morphine was non-existent.
None of this deterred the sick and wounded. They came like pilgrims to a religious miracle. In the prospect of evacuation—and it would indeed take a miracle to evacuate them—lay their salvation. Only one boatload of the sick escaped during October, wrote Okubo.
To shelter the hundreds of new patients, the Japanese medical corps built a temporary hospital nearby out of leaking, portable tents. They worked for 46 hours in the ‘merciless rain and wind, all were drenched…Words cannot describe this wretchedness,’ Okubo said. He blamed himself and his unit: ‘We deeply feel our responsibility and have no excuse for the many regrettable lapses in preparation through our sudden participation in the war and our inability to make a sufficient study of the needs of soldiers…’21
*Vasey, however, did not appreciate being reminded of Allen’s role by his staff officer, Colonel Spry, with whom he ‘did not hit it off’ (Horner, General Vasey’s War, p. 209).
*Dr Herber Longman, a botanist from the Queensland Museum, declined Blamey’s invitation to contribute, but took great pleasure in showing his collection of Papuan birds to Blamey’s commissioning scout, who happened to be called Major C.R. Bird. Longman also acted as a quasi-consultant to Blamey’s publishing interests: ‘The many New Guinea rodents include giant long-haired rats which are among the largest known species,’ he observed. Papua’s ‘giant bats’ were ‘quite good to eat in dire emergencies’ (Blamey Papers).